Friday, December 9, 2016

Americans' Lifespan is Shrinking: Experts Blame Victims

Yesterday, news circulated that Americans' death rate was rising ever so slightly. The article from the Wall Street Journal covered this news reports as follows:

Betsy McKay and Ron Winslow. December 8, 2016. Heart Disease Pushes Up Death Rate. The Wall Street Journal, A3. Americans are dying from heart disease at a faster rate, stalling four decades of gains against the nation’s leading killer and driving up the US mortality rate overall. The death rate from heart disease rose 0.9% last year, according to US mortality data released Thursday by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The death rate rose 3% for stroke, the fifth leading cause of death. Both changes, which researchers tie in large part to the rise in obesity and diabetes, helped push life expectancy down by one-tenth of a percentage point, to 78.8 years, according to the CDC…. Now the agency says the overall death rate rose 1.2% in 2015, to 733.1 per 100,000 people, the first significant increase in mortality overall in the US since 1999….

Did you read that the death rate for stroke rose 3%? That is a significant increase! Note that the article attributes the cause of the rising death rate to a condition ultimately framed as a LIFESTYLE choice (i.e., obesity).

What is "funny" about this report is that it is essentially replicating the results reported in 2015 of a rising death rate in middle-aged white populations. At that time, the rise in deaths was attributed to abuse of prescription/illegal drugs and alcohol:

Kimberly Leonard, "What Reports About White People Dying Missed," US News November 13, 2015,http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/11/13/yes-death-rates-for-middle-aged-whites-are-rising-but-whyWritten by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the report found mortality rates for whites began rising in 1999 and continued to do so through 2013. The rise was driven by drug and alcohol overdoses, suicide, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis.... The authors presented their data without directly stating the root cause for the destructive behaviors they identified as driving the trend, though they noted the prevalence of opioid use the U.S. has seen. They noted as well that a large group of people report difficulties with pain, which can lead them to take prescription painkillers or place them at risk of suicide. Prescription drugs, conversely, can make pain worse as their effects begin to diminish, and also have the potential to invoke suicidal thoughts. They additionally can be a gateway to illegal drugs such as heroin.

So, in the 2015 account, Americans were reported as dying at a higher rate from their bad habits. They were also reported as dying more from pregnancy.

CNN reported in 2015 that maternal mortality starting rising in the US in 2011:

Preliminary figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) indicate mortality rates in 2015 rose by 5.4 percent on 2014 - an increase of nearly 27,000 deaths, bringing the total to 528,340. Death rates in England and Wales had been falling since the 1970s, but this trend reversed in 2011 when mortality rates started rising.Health advisers are now saying the rising death rate could be caused by cuts to vital social services

The rising rate of autism in California and New Jersey over the last couple of years are not attributed to any particular cause and are not connected in the mainstream media to the rising death rates cited above:

Reese, Phillip. July 18 2016. Autism rates in California public schools jumped 7 percent in 2016. Sacramento Bee, http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article90300877.html#storylink=cpyThe increase was especially sharp among kindergartners, where autism cases grew by 17 percent last year [2015]. More than one of every 65 kindergartners in California public schools is classified as autistic.

March 31, 2016 --New Jersey again has the highest rates of those states evaluated: with 1 in 41 children (2.5% of children). This percentage is higher than the average percentage identified with ASD (1.5%) in all communities in the United States where CDC tracked ASD in 2012. The New Jersey rate marks an increase of 12% from the previous 1 in 45 statistic released two years ago.

I believe that the Fukushima nuclear disaster may be contributing (not exclusively causing but contributing) to rising rates of autism, stroke, and cardiovascular disease.

The role of Fukushima fallout and other environmental causes of autism and the rising death rates in the US and UK are entirely OBSCURED by mainstream media accounts that BLAME THE INDIVIDUAL for poor LIFESTYLE choices.

I can imagine a dystopic future with dramatically declining longevity and health described in mainstream media by health "experts" as resulting directly from individuals' poor lifestyle choices.

6 comments:

Yes, the truth will never be printed about disease and death. Everyday I read an article or two somewhere about how harmless radiation is. Today (Dec. 9th, 2016) on the front page of USA Today, there is an article about how Fukushima radiation has hit the US west coast for the first time this month, but no worries, it's so low it's almost beyond detecting and quite safe. All untruths. I think statistics of any kind are questionable. For instance, on my mother's death certifcate it says she died of a heart attack. In reality, she died when she accidentally fell off the front porch and hit her head. I have a good friend whose husband died of the flu, but his death certificate says he died of a heart attack also. If a Medical Examiner finds odd causes for death (such as accident, flu, or, heaven forbid, possibly radiation poisoning) he is required by law to report it, investigate it, or perform an autopsy. No one wants the high expense or trouble for autopsies. So heart attack and stroke have the attraction of covering all the bases.

Well, the current American diet is greatly inferior to the one available 70 years ago. Even if one buys organic there is no guarantee those items have not been contaminated through the water supply with glyphosate--it is being found in mothers' milk. Kind of like DDT at one time. There is of course air pollution and fluoride in the water. We are surrounded by all the amazing chemical plastic creations. And wireless, cell phones, etc. They all contribute to inferior health. Prescription drugs. Men and women getting strokes in their 30's and 40's. The FDA is corrupt. So is the EPA. The human condition is still around.

Yes american diet chocked full of americium in smoke detectors in landfills. Ongoing radioactive cesium, strontium, tritium, uranics, transuranics. from improperly disposee nuclear wastes from 100s of military and civil reactors. From open air and underground testing. From waste and plutonium in the country and the stuff hauled in from Canada, Germany, Russia, Japan for example. From Fukushimas explosions and continued contaminations. From nuclear processing. From nuclear medical waste. From billions of tons of uranium tailings. From radium, radon, polonium in coal and fossil fuels. Millions of tons.

Antibiotics do not work as ell either. Before the invention of penicillin and medical understanding of microbiology, vaccinations, public hygeine the average life expectancty was 40. People in the united states died from rudimentary skin infections flu, cholera, malaria, Newport and yellow fever, polio, syphilis and other venerial diseases, tetanus, typhoid, and many other diseases in massive numbers

About Me

I am a Professor at a large public university. I study political economy and biopolitics (the politics of life). My interests are diverse but are broadly concerned with economic, social and environmental justice. I have published 5 books: Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy and Ecological Sustainability: The Threat of Financial and Energy Complexes in the Twenty-First Century (2016); Fukusima and the Privatization of Risk (2013); Constructing Autism (2005); Governmentality, Biopower and Everyday Life (2008/2011); Governing Childhood (2010).
I also participated in an edited collection on Fukushima: Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization (2014).